An exploratory analysis of security on data transmission on relevant software engineering discussion sites

The Question and Answer (Q&A) sites are very popular nowadays for discussion on technological issues. Among the most prominent topics of these sites, posts related to security are widely visited. Security discussions may be classified broadly into two categories: application and infrastructure security. In this research, we studied several community Q&A sites to analyze the characteristics of requirements and difficulties to implement security in data transmission, one of the most dominant topics of infrastructure security. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of this kind. Our findings are expected to make it easier for the interested people to acquire knowledge about recent threats and security issues of data transmission in a methodical way and also to understand the trends of relevant technologies. We found that Transport Layer Security (TLS) is the most discussed technique over the years and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attack is the primary concern for the developers.